Aw, c'mon! In a galaxy where there are people who talk like Yoda and others who talk like Jar-Jar Binks, and nobody says boo to either of them, you're going to make a big deal about this ? I think we should hold the Emperor of the Free World to a higher standard than a bumbling buffoon and a mystic...

Plus, I actually don't think your math works on the first place. If it's "I am Fred" but "Fred is me", it would never be "Whom are" in the first place. If "who" were the subject, it would be "Who is you?" The "are" indicates that "you...

You think that's bad... Our Corporate IT Overlords pushed out hacks to Microsoft Office. Now there's all sorts of useless additions to the ribbons, most of which are not removable by us mere mortals. I mean, really: putting in a default start-up dialog requiring us to enter Author Name? Adding a rib...

Oh, shit! He's quitting xkcd! No, just going to higher ground in advance of the next Zanclean Flood. Or maybe it's just time for another "balloon" : If it keeps on rainin' levee's goin' to break If it keeps on rainin' levee's goin' to break When the levee breaks I'll have no place to stay...

Hey, I know :P Let's go fractal. Start with renaming each state's counties. Next the cities and towns. Next the street names in each city. That should keep everyone busy for a while. Plus if you pick a rename for, say, Washington St. that someone else already used, you have to drink a beer. Each time.

Explains the ambiguous meaning of "down". In VMs and dreams, "down" is the next layer of construct, depending on a substrate (etymology intended) "above". In "turtles all the way down", the "lower" layer is the substrate for the one above it. Down i...

Reminds me of a rather dumb experiment I ran back in the early 80s. My company had recently installed a majorly honking badass VAX 780 system, and I was learning the various things you could do in the shell environment (tho' of course DEC didn't call it a 'shell,' just DCL or whatever it turned into...

This reminds me of Ursula K. LeGuin's short story The Darkness Box in the collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters , and especially the anecdote of how the story came to be: When my daughter Caroline was three she came to me with a small wooden box in her small hands and said, “Guess fwat is in this b...

I'm not sure if the main comic is meant to be a trolling of Comp Sci students or not, but I DO believe that high-level programming skills (problem solving, systematic thinking, etc) are essential tools for people outside of the Comp Sci realm. You have it backwards. A proper education doesn't so mu...

And the answer is.... Alice Cooper, "Flash Fearless " - and the crew of the Spaceship Argo. "Argo stands for Allegiance, Respect, Guts, and 'Onesty" I don't recall exactly which episode had that quote. To the best of my knowledge, other than the original script, it's not written ...

I see a few categories emerging... feel free to edit/rearrange/discuss: Puns on real places: {snip} Southframpton I thought all the *frampton items were a reference to a certain Peter . Memes/People/Businesses: {snip} Redsox For a local boy, he got that wrong: it's "Bosox" . Not to be con...

But it does remind me of one of my favorite lines. Extra bonus internetz to anyone who recognizes the source. " I don't get it captain. How come we fell up ?" " Well, in this sector of the galaxy, gravity is not so much a law as more of a local ordinance." I'll admit to it being...

Is it a coincident that this week a paper got published saying that gravity is an emergent property, similar to the Casimir effect? Almost a dead certainty it's not a coincidence. But it does remind me of one of my favorite lines. Extra bonus internetz to anyone who recognizes the source. " I ...

Look, guys: this could be the last XKCD comic ever, and the next-to-last-day that echochamber forums exist, depending on the official votecount Tues nite. Let's all be respectful and give each other a last hug, take turns in the comfy chair, and ... oh, yeah, and then grab all our guns and bottled w...

I saw the dreamy Prof Cox dropping a feather and cannonball in there on one of his series. It was a bit disappointing somehow - they showed it only in slow motion or something, so the feather didn't seem to drop like a stone. ETA: yes, that's exactly what they did . I guess the director thought it ...

In the David Weber Safehold series, the "Church" had enforced Roman numerals as part of their ban on technological development. I think it was basically that Roman numerals were so cumbersome to use that it would basically prohibit the development of advanced mathematics since running lon...

First time I've been genuinely disappointed. Maybe being a long-time movie buff is part of the problem. My parents used to take me to the wonderful double features at "Hark - Hark! The Clark!" the Clark Theatre, not to mention subscribing to Film Quarterly and Sight and Sound. So at least ...

(Also we don't know if that's a true FutureBeing body. Imagine if we could only interact with the past via a cross-temporal remote-controlled drone-type-thing (inverse of Terminator lore: biological matter cannot time travel, inorganic machinery can..?), giving all kinds of confusion to pastpeople ...

least we know, thanks to the questions being asked by the futurebeing, that: a) Spiders are not the ultimate rulers of the Earth, b) Whatever they actually accomplished, betweentimes, they never made webs thick enough for a technological civilisation eventually capable of temporal mechanics to have...